The latest view of Saturn from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope captures exquisite details of the ring system - which looks like a phonograph record with grooves that represent detailed structure within the rings - and atmospheric details that once could only be captured by spacecraft visiting the distant world.
Space-based telescopes such as Hubble, Webb and NASA’s Lucy mission will also observe the event. After the impact, that may change to 11 hours and 45 minutes, but follow-up observations will determine how much of a shift occurred.Īstronomers will use ground-based telescopes to observe the binary asteroid system and see how much the orbital period of Dimorphos changed, which will determine if DART was successful. The nudge will shift Dimorphos slightly and make it more gravitationally bound to Didymos – so the collision won’t change the binary system’s path around the Earth or increase its chances of becoming a threat to our planet, Chabot said.ĭimorphos completes an orbit around Didymos every 11 hours and 55 minutes. This isn’t going to blow up the asteroid it isn’t going to put it into lots of pieces.” “But for Dimorphos, this really is about asteroid deflection, not disruption. “Sometimes we describe it as running a golf cart into a great pyramid or something like that,” Chabot said. The fast impact will only change Dimorphos’ speed as it orbits Didymos by 1%, which doesn’t sound like a lot – but it will change the moon’s orbital period.Īn illustration shows NASA's DART spacecraft and the Italian Space Agency's LICIACube before the collision with Dimorphos. The spacecraft is about 100 times smaller than Dimorphos, so it won’t obliterate the asteroid. The video, while not immediately available, will be streamed back to Earth in the weeks and months following the collision.ĭimorphos was chosen for this mission because its size is relative to asteroids that could pose a threat to Earth. Three minutes after impact, the CubeSat will fly by Dimorphos to capture images and video. It recently deployed from the spacecraft and is traveling behind it to record what happens. The briefcase-size CubeSat hitched a ride with DART into space. This collision will be recorded by LICIACube, or Light Italian CubeSat for Imaging of Asteroids, a companion cube satellite provided by the Italian Space Agency. It aims to crash into Dimorphos to change the asteroid’s motion in space, according to NASA. There may even be shattered pieces of the spacecraft in the crater. The team is eager to learn more about the impact crater left behind, which they estimate to be about 33 to 65 feet (10 to 20 meters) in size. Near-Earth asteroid has a surface like a fun-house pit of plastic balls On the day of impact, images taken by DRACO will not only reveal our first look at Dimorphos, but the spacecraft will use them to autonomously guide itself for an encounter with the tiny moon.ĭuring the event, these images will stream back to Earth at a rate of one per second, providing a “pretty stunning” look at the moon, said Nancy Chabot, planetary scientist and DART coordination lead at the Applied Physics Laboratory. Meanwhile, Dimorphos is 525 feet (160 meters) in diameter, and its name means “two forms.” Didymos is nearly half a mile (0.8 kilometer) across. It means “twin” in Greek, a nod to how the asteroid forms a binary system with the smaller asteroid, or moon.
Detecting the threat of near-Earth objects, or NEOs, that could cause grave harm is a primary focus of NASA and other space organizations around the world.Īstronomers discovered Didymos more than two decades ago. Near-Earth objects are asteroids and comets with orbits that place them within 30 million miles (48.3 million kilometers) of Earth. INTERACTIVE: One spacecraft’s journey to test Earth’s planetary defenses “For the first time ever, we will measurably change the orbit of a celestial body in the universe,” said Robert Braun, head of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory’s Space Exploration Sector. The event will be the agency’s first full-scale demonstration of deflection technology that can protect the planet. What will be visible when the DART spacecraft crashes into a tiny asteroid
Illustration of NASA's DART spacecraft and the Italian Space Agency's LICIACube prior to impact at the Didymos binary system.
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